One of the most impressive moments I've experienced in a rpg as a player was in Runequest campaign, where my character wanted to learn some more spirit magic, healing this time. The following text tells how the learning was handled - the GM running the game is quite exceptional GM and I've learned a lot from him.

As our games often go forward fast, that question often comes up. Especially when fighting against enemies that can see in darkness, it can become important. It is often ignored, but it can become an effective combat tactic to get rid of opponent's lights.

Fellow gamemasters, I need your input; I'm trying to create a game preparation formula that can be used for most games. For this, I need some input from you. I'd appreciate if you can tell a bit about your game preparations, mainly how many and how well prepared npc's you need.

Pacifism is a type of hindrance/disadvantage/flaw that works very differently in different types of games. In most games I play or run, no-one would take the pacifism unless there's a work-a-round against it's limitations - and I can't blame anyone for that, as these games usually have at least one combat each session, and usually everyone's most eagerly waiting for those combats! And they often are the most exciting parts of a game session.

From both player's and GM's point of view I've enjoyed most about games where players have lived in one specific location. They get familiar with the people and location, may start to like people there, get possessions or even rule a portion of the area.

"My character is ready. What? Oh, I need to get some flaws to pay off all the extra stuff I've already picked. But my character is perfect... Now, what flaws would have least effect on my character?"

Sounds familiar? All too familiar to me. Most of my players want to think of all those munchkiny statistics and features first, and then, if the system has a mechanism for negative features (flaws, hindrances, disadvantages, whatever they are called), they try to find something that doesn't hinder their character. I confess, I'm guilty of that too.

If I get it right, DnD next will have some quite interesting features in character design. I've been tinkering my own game systems (but dropped the design when I found savage worlds which filled my rpg needs for now) and one feature I've been think of is having classes as a less rigid packages you can 'buy'. From what I've read, DDN will have an approaches to classes that resembles this. What I hadn't thought of was buying races as this kind of packages.

Players are often lazy. While they enjoy playing games, they might not share Game Master's enthusiasm to the campaign setting and it's world, and as getting to know it could require reading somewhere from 10 to 150 pages, they might not really know or understand many things that come up during the game.

These are the simple but functional cyberpunk rules for savage worlds I'm using in my Savage Cyberworlds cybercthulhu campaign. The rules may be subject to changes but I'm mainly quite happy about them.

A while ago I wrote a post about how I ended up with Savage Worlds. The post got some critique for me judging games just by reading rules; it's true, you can't tell how a game plays without actually trying it. But there are other factors that may matter when choosing a game system than just how it plays.